Red America: Western Front
Chapter One: Territorial Gains
"Long live the Revolution!"
Commissar-Colonel Elisabeth Braddock unsheathed her long, straight blade from its scabbard and drew her small automatic machine-pistol from its holster on her hip, before scrambling out of the muddy trench that her forces had dug in the ruins of what had once been San Francisco. The rain, infrequent though it was, had turned the bottom of the trench into a soup of wet earth, blood, rats, shell casings and other assorted detritus of war. Elisabeth had been shown around the division headquarters a few blocks away, and had even been invited to stay there, but she had had her fill of pen pushing. Instead, she had chosen to lead from the front, as she felt a Commissar ought to. Now, she was preparing to storm a rebel stronghold that had taken root in what had been a substantial library, in order to break the deadlock that had apparently held here for around a month. Every attack the Soviets had made had been repulsed (which Elisabeth found astounding, considering the inferior quality of the rebels' training and weapons), but Elisabeth was determined that this one would succeed.
No matter the cost.
Running towards the library, followed by two dozen of her finest men, Elisabeth began feeling bullets whip-cracking through the air around her. She wasn't overly concerned about being hit, however – she was using her telepathic powers to throw off the rebels' aim ever so slightly, in order to appear as if she were invulnerable to their weapons. It was just as well, really, since her black greatcoat and cap marked her out significantly from the rest of her troops, and thus made her a target for any rebel eager to gather the scalp of a high-ranking Red Army soldier. Taking cover behind a large chunk of fallen masonry, Elisabeth raised her pistol, clipped on a sniper's sight and took aim carefully, ignoring the continuous rattle of weapons fire around her and picking out a man stationed at one of the library windows. He was blindly spraying bullets in all directions, as if he thought that by increasing the volume of fire he put out, he would also increase his chances of survival. Elisabeth scoffed at the notion internally, but then put that thought out of her head and firmly squeezed the trigger on her pistol. The man's head burst like a grape, brains and eyeballs splattering the window sill in front of him as his body collapsed. Elisabeth smiled grimly as the corpse started spewing the last of its lifeblood down the outer wall of the library, and unhooked a knife from her belt. Pushing up her sleeve, she gently marked another small, bloody line in her flesh, indicating her first kill for this new campaign.
The first of many, she found herself thinking, as a wide smile creased her lips for a moment or two. Alongside her, her troops were swarming towards the library, their weapons up and raining bullets on the defenders' positions. "Forward!" she howled, gesturing with her sword as if it were a conductor's baton. "Wipe the rebel scum out!" Pushing herself up from her sniping position, she raised her pistol and started pumping the trigger methodically. We'll have these idiots in the Alaskan labour camps before nightfall.
And then, suddenly, the reason why the library had remained free made itself shatteringly clear. One man stood outside the building, his hands stretched out in front of him with his fists clenched. Elisabeth watched as her troops prepared to cut him down – only for them to be thrown off their feet by massive tremors, as the ground seemed to ripple beneath them. Inwardly, Elisabeth cursed. She'd hoped that the rebels wouldn't have any superhumans of their own here on the West Coast – most of the United States' quota of super-powered humans seemed to be concentrated in the New York area, for which she'd been grateful on her way out here – but apparently she'd been wrong. The anonymous man stood firm as the Soviet troops counter-attacked, throwing up shields of earth to protect him from fierce weapons fire and sending more ripples of concrete and mud into the ranks of Elisabeth's soldiers.
This called for a simple, direct solution. Shouting for her adjutant Lieutenant Wagner over the din of violently shifting earth, Elisabeth pointed towards the roof of the library. "Teleport there, and dispose of the American however you see fit," she said, knowing that Lieutenant Wagner would follow her orders in as direct and concise a way as he could. Lieutenant Wagner nodded, and then vanished in a puff of acrid smoke and then reappeared a few metres over the head of the American, his body perfectly poised against the pull of gravity. As he moved towards the ground, Elisabeth saw him wrap his long, thin tail around the rebel's neck and then clench it tightly, snapping the other man's vertebrae without even trying hard. Lithely, Lieutenant Wagner dropped to the muddy street and, without missing a step, was already moving towards the now-defenceless library before his target had even hit the ground.
Elisabeth smiled wolfishly and began to advance again, her gloved fist tightening around the hilt of her sword. The air became thick with lead after the rebels' shock had faded, but Elisabeth simply let the bullets flicker past her. To her left, she saw one of her soldiers virtually explode from the inside out as he was hit low in the gut and his intestines were splattered across the ground behind him. She cursed again, and cried "Get me a medic!", causing another trooper to scurry up to her and begin binding the wounded man's torn stomach with battlefield dressings. It probably wouldn't do a lot of good, given the severity of the wound, but she wanted the soldier cared for, in any event. Perhaps, if he was very lucky, the Soviet Army's medical corps would have prepared some of the healing enzyme that she had obtained in New York, and he would be back on his feet within a few hours.
She sincerely doubted that, though, given the inefficiency of Dr MacTaggert's operations.
Leaving the soldier in the medic's care for the moment, she ran towards the doors of the library and directed some of the other soldiers to attempt to gain entry into the library. "Captain Beaubier," she began, "I want shaped charges placed against this door, timed for three seconds each." She smiled briefly. "We'll show these rebels just who they're dealing with."
The other woman nodded briefly in response. "Yes, sir. How quickly do you want it done?" she asked, redundantly.
"As soon as you can, Captain," Elisabeth replied, glancing quickly at the door, and hoping that the rebels didn't decide to stage a counter-attack. She doubted that would happen, given their numbers, but she didn't want to be caught off-guard, either. "I don't want another nasty surprise."
"Yes, sir," the other woman replied again, before she turned to one of her sergeants and directed him to fetch a demolition team. He scurried off towards to other end of the assault line and returned with two soldiers – one male, one female – laden down with explosives and detonator caps. "Lieutenant Allerdyce – Corporal Blevins," Captain Beaubier began, nodding to each of them in turn. "We need this door down. Now."
"And you'll have it, sir," the man replied, in a thick Australian accent. Elisabeth was always impressed by how many people had accepted the Soviet dream, and this was just another example of somebody discarding their capitalist ideals and joining the revolution. Lieutenant Allerdyce knelt by the door, assisted by his fellow soldier, and delicately placed several lumps of plastic explosive on the door, with detonators embedded deeply in each of them. "Best take cover, sir, unless you want to be filleted," the man said. Elisabeth thought that was excellent advice, and ducked behind the convenient cover of a chunk of fallen masonry. She watched as the man struck a single match and held it up in front of him. The woman he had brought with him stood beside him and concentrated, extending something around the two of them for a moment while he stared at the match and caused its flame to grow and expand beyond its normal limits, creating what looked like a small two-legged creature that ambled casually through the barrier the woman had made and then leapt at the explosives, detonating them and ripping the barricaded doors off their hinges.
"Now!" Elisabeth cried, and she and her troops swarmed forwards into the wrecked entrance, opening fire on the trapped defenders before closing to hand-to-hand range and using their bayonets and pistols to continue the slaughter. Elisabeth knew that the reason they were bothering to attack this enclave at all was on the upper level, so, after driving her blade deep into the gut of a middle-aged man who had attempted to bundle her to the ground, she made for the closest staircase and began climbing it as fast as she could. Two panicked rebels began shooting at her as she rounded a bend in the staircase, but since Elisabeth had sensed them before she had begun climbing, she was prepared for them. Using the same trick that she had on the battlefield outside, she threw their aim off and advanced towards them relentlessly. Raising her sword, she hacked off one of the rebels' hands at the mid-forearm and then unloaded two armour-piercing rounds into the face of the other with her pistol. As the wounded rebel lay on the stairs, blood pumping from his ruined forearm, Elisabeth casually ejected the spent clip from her gun and slapped home a new one. She took her time to do so, enjoying the sensation of sheer terror that wafted up from the crippled man's mind, and relishing the growing puddle that was spreading at the crotch of his fatigues.
"Please –" the man begged, almost sobbing. "Please don't kill me – I have a daughter –"
"Then you should have thought about her before you picked up your rifle, fool," Elisabeth replied coldly, and pressed her pistol against his temple. "But you may take comfort from the fact that she will grow up a child of the state." Then she pulled the trigger and watched the light in the man's eyes go out, his mind vanishing without a whisper as his brains decorated the stairwell in livid splashes of red and white. Pausing, Elisabeth spat contemptuously on both bodies, before she carved two more marks into her arm and then proceeded up the stairwell to the second floor. Her target was only a few steps away.
Up ahead of her, Elisabeth saw a heavy door that was carved with intricate wooden designs. She could sense her target behind it, so, after putting her fingers to her temples and feeling her telepathic powers flare to life, she took the liberty of borrowing his eyes for a moment or two, in order to get a look at what kind of barricade he had. It wasn't much – just a chest and a couple of chairs shoved up against the door – but Elisabeth still felt that she didn't want to waste any time or bullets getting through it. Frowning, she twined her psychic presence around her quarry's mind and forced him to get up from where he had been cowering. Let me in, she ordered him, and she felt him pulling the chest away from the door. When her path was clear, she put her shoulder against the heavy wood and shoved the door open wide, revealing the quarry she had been sent to capture – a lanky man clad in ragged clothes, whose messy brown hair and thick glasses were covered with dirt and dust, and who was surrounded by piles of half-finished machinery and engineering tools.
Elisabeth smiled disarmingly. "Hello, Dr Banner," she said, effortlessly slapping aside the weak punch he tried to throw at her and dropping him to the floor with a backhanded slap from her free hand. "I'm afraid your time is up."
"What are you going to do with me?" Dr Banner gasped, touching one side of his mouth with tentative fingers, trying to see if he was bleeding or not.
"Oh, now that would be telling, wouldn't it?" Elisabeth grabbed the man by his collar and pulled him to his feet. "Let's just say your research on gamma-mutation interests the Soviet Army's High Command, and they would like to… discuss it with you."
Kitty Pryde glanced up at the sky, enjoying the sensation of the sun against her face for the first time in too long a time. She hoped that the weather would hold just long enough so that she could savour it before getting down to the dirty business at hand.
"This is going to be like trying to find a needle in a metropolis," said Jamie Madrox as he stood beside her. "You know, I still don't know why we got sent out here when New York needs our help much more."
Kitty shrugged. "Logan knows best, Jamie," she said, not really believing that for a moment. The reason she had been sent out here was still fresh in her mind after weeks of cross-country travel, dodging Soviet tanks and foot patrols through a dozen cities, using every available means of stolen transport they could, and trying to make contact with the scattered rebel cells that were operating throughout the United States: rebel intelligence reports had produced evidence that not only were the Red forces going to try a major push here on the west coast, but they were also gathering up as many scientists and revolutionary thinkers as they could: Reed Richards had been taken from his teaching position in Seattle only a few months beforehand, and Daniel Rand's technology farm in Connecticut had been overrun with Soviet troops before that. What the rebel spies had learned didn't exactly point to anything specific, but the fact that all the abductees all had one thing in common – their aptitude for science and technology – didn't exactly point to anything good.
With that in mind, Logan had asked Kitty, Madrox and four other rebels to get out to San Francisco in order to protect one of his old acquaintances, a man called Tony Stark. From what Logan had told her, Kitty knew Stark to be a genius with anything mechanical –which made him just the sort of person the Soviets were likely to want to capture. Logan had warned her that Stark was a smart guy, and would probably have found a way to hide from the Soviet troops, but Kitty had laughed, and told him not to worry.
Looking at the size of the city, she thought that perhaps she'd been a little overconfident.
"Where do we start, sir?" asked one of the rebels, a short-haired blonde girl a little younger than Kitty, both of whose ears were pierced five times and who sported a nasty scar along the side of her stomach, where red-hot shrapnel from a hand-grenade had gouged a line into her skin. Another scar arced across the left half of her face, from the inner part of her ear to the edge of her lips, giving her face a perpetual half-grin. Madrox gripped her by the shoulder and nodded in the direction he was facing, towards a line of ruined buildings and large chunks of rubble.
"That way seems like a good idea, Tabby," he said. "All of you be careful, all right? This isn't exactly our home turf any more." He glanced towards the man holding the squad's precious belt-fed machine gun. "Danny, keep an eye out for trouble. If anything happens, we might need you to cover our retreat."
The young man touched two fingers to his brow in a brief salute. "Sure thing, boss – Sarah-Jane and I are good at that." He patted the barrel of his gun affectionately then, making Madrox roll his eyes.
"Someday, Mr Ketch, you and I are going to have a serious talk about you giving your gun a girl's name," he said. "That just screams 'weirdo', you know?"
Danny laughed, and leaned closer to the muzzle of his gun, murmuring "Don't worry, sweetie, he doesn't really mean it," and then began scanning the surrounding area for any signs of Soviet activity. When he was satisfied that the area was as secure as possible, he moved out ahead of the squad, keeping his gun braced and ready to fire as he did so. Following his lead, Kitty hoped that the Ivans would be too busy watching the more populated areas to worry about this particular area, but she didn't hold out too much hope of that, from the fresh appearance of the tread-marks on the muddy ground. Soviet tanks had been through here – and they'd done so recently, too. Guess they'll be back sooner rather than later, she thought sourly, and drew both of the automatic pistols from her waistband. If she was going to get ambushed, she wanted to at least be caught with a gun to hand.
"Hank, Cecilia – you guys spread out that way," Kitty said, gesturing to her two old friends to widen the rebels' line a little, so that they weren't too bunched up. Kitty had seen that doing that could be lethal: one misstep on a well-placed landmine, and an entire platoon could become mincemeat in seconds.
Hank nodded. "Good idea, Katherine," he agreed, and shifted his position about a dozen steps to the rear of the group, with Cecilia following him automatically. Ever since Hank had received that concussion, Kitty had noticed, Cecilia had stuck to him like glue.
"So when are they gonna make you a squad leader, huh?" Cecilia asked in an attempt to sound casual. "Hank and I hear that Logan and Val are real impressed with the way you've been handling yourself on missions – and you too, Jamie."
"It's up to them," Kitty replied while keeping her eyes focused on the horizon. "I never understood why they bothered trying to make Jamie a squad leader, though – he's got less leadership potential than a brick."
"Hey!" Madrox retorted as the squad came across a large derelict building that was totally open to the elements, with rats and cockroaches scurrying around inside the shattered walls. "I heard that!"
"Good. Maybe it'll give you something to work towards," Cecilia chuckled before she high-fived her husband.
"Quiet, guys," Danny hissed as he moved past the wrecked building, which got everybody else in the squad to duck behind what cover was available. "Looks like we're not the only ones who had an interest in coming here – look." He stretched out a hand and pointed towards a group of eight Russian troops who were obviously on patrol. They were laughing and cracking what Kitty assumed were jokes amongst themselves, totally oblivious to their surroundings. Fortunately, that meant that they hadn't noticed the rebel squad yet, for which she was extremely grateful.
"Okay," she said in a low voice, "they haven't seen us yet, so that means we've got the upper hand here." She held out her hands. "Everybody grab hold – I'm going to take us down into the sewer systems so that we don't have to get into any kind of firefight. The mission's too important for that."
Madrox grasped her hand, and all the other squad members took hold of one of her arms. Kitty took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and then phased, letting the six of them float gently down below ground. When she opened her eyes again, all of the squad was safely in the sewer with her.
Madrox sighed as he took stock of his new surroundings. "The more things change…"